Two Air National Guard fighter pilots paid tribute today to the passengers on United Airlines Flight 93 who by thwarting the plane's hijackers may have saved the pilots from having to shoot down a commercial airliner in defense of Washington.

''They took control and they made a stand,'' said one pilot, who spoke on condition he be identified only by his call sign, Lou, in their first newspaper interview since the Sept. 11 attacks. ''These people on this flight said, 'We're going to take control, we're going to try to do something to control our destiny.' And by doing that they allowed us not to have to make that bad decision to shoot. So we feel a lot of gratitude for all those people.''

The second pilot, a commercial pilot who would be identified only by his code name, Honey, said the passengers who apparently struggled with their hijackers ''saved the day for a lot of folks on the ground and they definitely saved it for us too.'' He added, ''I owe a lot to the folks on Flight 93.''

The two men, along with a third pilot who did not consent to be interviewed, were the first fliers to be scrambled in F-16's from Langley Air Force Base in Hampton, Va., shortly after the World Trade Center towers were hit. Armed with missiles but little information, they flew to Washington in time to confirm that the Pentagon was on fire and to receive garbled orders from the Secret Service suggesting that they were to protect the White House from possible attack.

The pilots, who spoke at a news conference here today, said that they never received explicit orders to fire on incoming planes perceived to be hostile and that they did not know until after they landed about Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania apparently while headed for Washington. But military and government officials have said that the president had authorized the shooting of any plane that refused to divert from the capital and that the fighter pilots were airborne in time to have done so.

Their morning was quite a departure from the norm. Before Sept. 11, the pilots, in the North Dakota Air National Guard's 119th Fighter Wing, a unit known as the Happy Hooligans, were what one pilot characterized as ''firemen in the air.'' For the most part, they sat on alert in their hangars at Langley, waiting for the rare call to fire up their jets and scramble, typically to check out a wayward Cessna or a military plane with a malfunctioning transponder.

For years, the threat of an incoming aerial attack on the American homeland had been considered so remote that defense of the country's airspace had been relegated to the National Guard. The number of planes assigned to the mission seemed to diminish each year, and on the morning of Sept. 11 there were only 14 from coast to coast. As the military's air sovereignty mission had contracted, the Hooligans' operations had been moved over the last decade from their headquarters here in Fargo to bases in Klamath Falls, Ore., Riverside, Calif., and then, in 1998, to Virginia.

Neither Lou, a major, nor Honey, a captain, had ever served in the active-duty military, and neither had ever flown anything resembling a combat mission. Lou, a 34-year-old Fargo native, enlisted in the National Guard in 1985 and has worked full time for the Guard as a flight trainer since 1996. Honey, a 29-year-old Minnesotan, joined the Guard in 1993 while attending college in North Dakota and is on military leave from his job as a commercial pilot for United Express. He has been based full time at Langley since April.

The third pilot, who declined to be interviewed for personal reasons, his superiors say, is a 33-year-old pilot for Northwest Airlines who, until Sept. 11, flew part time for the National Guard. All three pilots continue to fly regular missions as part of a vastly expanded Norad air defense operation that has fighter jets airborne at all times.

When they were ordered to their jets at 9:24 a.m., 38 minutes after the first plane hit the World Trade Center, the pilots had little idea what was happening. Both knew one plane had hit the towers, and Lou had caught a glimpse of the second strike on CNN just before climbing into his cockpit.

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Flying at nearly 600 miles an hour in a straight-line formation at about 25,000 feet, the pilots were directed first to the east and then to the north by the North East Air Defense Sector, a division of the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or Norad. Soon they saw smoke rising into a crystalline sky.

''You could tell from a ways out that there was something out there smoking pretty good,'' Honey said.

Because he was fixated on the television images of the burning trade center, Lou thought perhaps they were approaching New York. Then they got a little closer.

From the air, they could not tell that a plane had hit the building. ''A commercial airline never crossed my mind,'' Honey said. ''Looking back at Oklahoma, I thought maybe it was a truck bomb or internal bomb.''

Their radio frequencies became cluttered with orders and chatter. ''It was like getting 10 hours of conversation in about 10 minutes,'' Lou said. ''No one knew what was going on. It was something that's never happened. All of a sudden the threat that we've always been looking outward for was now coming at us from inward.''

The two pilots said that at one point, someone broke in on the Federal Aviation Administration frequency being monitored by the third pilot. The message was garbled and hard to make out, but a military official said the pilot came away with the sense that he had been told to ''protect the house,'' meaning the White House. ''He said, 'I think I just talked to the Secret Service, but I'm not sure,' '' Lou said.

After more than four hours of flying, much of it spent escorting civilian aircraft to nearby airports, the pilots landed back at Langley in time to watch their colleagues strapping missiles onto waiting planes. It was only then that they heard about Flight 93 and realized what might have been.

Both men said they would have insisted on double checking, or authenticating, any orders to fire on a commercial plane, but then would have done so, trusting their chain of command. In retrospect they have convinced themselves that downing a plane controlled by terrorists would have saved lives and property on the ground.